After the End
by Bibliotecaria.D
Summary: Life keeps going after the Apocalypse. Vortex doesn't want to die, even when he should. Pt. 7: Blades is through waiting.
1. Chapter 1

**Title: **00:00

**Warnings: **Character death, overblown prose

**Rating: **G

**Continuity: **G1, Season 3 _After the End_ AU

**Characters:** Vortex, Spike Witwicky

**Disclaimer: **The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.

**Motivation (Prompt): **_Zero Hour_

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><p>"The End of Days!" cried the despairing and defeated, and it made a grandly dramatic pronouncement. Very <em>Woe betide us, the end is nigh!<em> prophet on the mountain, heralding the apocalypse with hands outstretched to the heavens. The people would gather under him, repenting sins, weeping, and praying unto the gods for deliverance, forgiveness, or both. Final scene to the act, the agonized poses held as the lights fade to black and the curtain comes down.

Ta-daa! Climax done, story over, no more lines to be spoken. Cue the audience moved to tears as they applaud.

What utter garbage.

Storytellers liked to throw in that cliché _'The End!'_ because the depressing truth was that stories didn't end until the last character died. And even then, in all likelihood the scenery went on.

The end of days wasn't. Even after Megatron and Optimus Prime killed each other, there was Galvatron and Rodimus Prime. Then came Unicron, and in the wake of that catastrophe chased the Quintesson Wars. Factions went to pieces somewhere around the time the Quints executed Galvatron. All of Cybertron united as it fought against its slavemaster creators. Civil war shifted to a war for freedom with no pause in-between. Autobot, neutral, and Decepticon fought and died side-by-side, and they _won_, but even winning was a loss. Hope was irrefutably squashed by the Quints' endgame ploy: Unicron's revival. The Chaos Bringer's corpse cut like a battering ram through Cybertron's defenses, followed up by waves and waves of enslaved Sharkicons and lesser mechanical creatures.

They fought. They won. And still Cybertron cracked apart, melting slag spiraling too close to the nearest star as survivors desperately spilled out into the gravity well to be sucked in and die, or – rarely - escape. Most died. Some lived.

It all happened, it all ended. The fabled Zero Hour arrived, and when it did, time kept going.

The living were shell-shocked but _alive_. Somehow, that fact left them more reluctant to turn on each other than ever before. The remaining Autobots and Decepticons met on wandering asteroids, congregated in old colonies, and flocked like the refugees they now were to the cold comfort of Earth. The humans, at least, no longer had the civilization left to mount any kind of resistance to the race that had led the Quintessons to their world. What resources remained on the planet were free to whomever needed them. To whomever had the ability to get them, because not many did anymore.

"The End of Days has come!" cried the filthy, crazed prophets in the ruins of New York City, and even the Decepticons awkwardly avoided those ones. Out of some lingering sense of obligation and a heavy weight of guilt, the Autobots still tried to help those humans eking civilization out of the wreckage. Many of the humans didn't want help. The majority didn't have the means to refuse it, and accepted the Autobots' aid with a bitter hatred that never faded.

Spike Witwicky stayed with the Autobots, of course. There was loyalty to his race, or loyalty to the ones who would save it at the expense of their own lives, and that was a choice not many could claim a right or wrong of. It wasn't like he had anyone flesh and blood left to defend. He sat often with his shoulders pulled forward against the burn scars, grief nursing parasitic at his heart, and it visibly ate age into him day by day. He hadn't been young when he'd lost his wife, and he'd already been old when he'd buried his son.

He was the only one of all of them who ever tried to speak with the prophets. He claimed to do it as some long-forgotten duty as the Autobot-human ambassador. When asked what he said to the prophets, Spike just shrugged. "Well, now what?"

Vortex thought it an appropriate question.

It wasn't an exact translation of his thoughts when he stood over the grayed-out corpse of Swindle, but the sentiment came through. He'd felt the gestalt-links fail in his spark like limbs being removed. Phantom voices, memories of sensation and emotion fell into the terrifying numbness he remembered so well from the Detention Center. Gestalts were a one-way equation: all addition, no subtraction allowed.

But he lived. Vortex survived, a pathetic echo of a life, and in response to the human's question, he shrugged in turn. They were both lingering, a bit disbelieving that the end wasn't finished.

"I don't know," he said back, and together they looked out over a world limping on, post-Apocalypse.

Zero hour - and counting.

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	2. The Best Ending

**Title: **The Best Ending

**Warnings:** Character death, self-hate

**Rating: **G

**Continuity: **G1, Season 3** - **_After the End_ AU

**Characters:** Swindle, Vortex, Combaticons

**Disclaimer: **The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.

**Motivation (Prompt): **_"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one."__ - Oscar Wilde_

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><p>The way the gestalt link worked, they shared bits and pieces of themselves through it whether they wanted to or not. The terminal linkages installed into their spark chambers facilitated combining, but it also prohibited separation.<p>

Not disconnecting from Bruticus. That was physical, and it felt weird in ways they got used to: the give and take as their bodies meshed together and opened autonomous pathways of energon and electricity into a larger circulatory system through them. They combined - one large body made of five smaller forms that disappeared into a finely-knitted network of machinery - and resumed using their unconnected bodies once Bruticus came apart.

No, the kind of separation it prevented was the one they desired most: straightforward, blessed isolation inside their own minds. At the spark level, though, that had been made impossible. They'd been rebuilt and freed and chained in one stroke, and they both loved and hated Starscream for that fool's gold freedom.

They hadn't been gestalt long. In terms of the war, they'd been individuals longer than they'd been the component parts of Bruticus. Swindle had been the most independent of all of them. The rest of them had at least been a combat unit before the Detention Center. Swindle, when it came down to the trial sentencing, had simply been at the wrong place at the wrong time on the wrong side. He'd been an accessory to Onslaught's grand plan, but not a real accomplice. He wasn't even a military mech. He was an independent civilian trader with a lot of military contacts, and he'd only been connected to Onslaught as part of the supply chain. Swindle had been guilty of a lot, sure, but not of Onslaught's unit's crime.

Shockwave had just gotten lucky to catch him, and Onslaught's attempted usurpation had been severe enough to earn a mass sentence on them all.

So there had been the trial, and then the box. Swindle had spent over 4 million years imprisoned beside them in those terrible Detention Center boxes, marinating in the unfairness of his sentence and his loathing for those who boxed him away to rust. He'd never stopped resenting the rest of them for that.

For a while, he'd actively hated them, but one thing a gestalt didn't allow was hatred directed at itself. It rebounded on the originator as self-hate, and it was so very hard to not understand the hated gestaltmate's point of view on everything. So Swindle cooled down from outright hate. Instead, he seethed, he bemoaned, and he schemed.

Maybe the rest of the Combaticons should have paid more attention to his anger, but it wasn't like they were having an easy time of it. They may have been a combat unit before, but working together had hardly prepared them to be living inside each others' sparks. Even if they weren't sharing minds, the mingling of sparks through the chamber linkages influenced their thought processes. That...took getting used to. It took mentally sorting out things they didn't particularly want to deal with.

For a while, they hated each other, if not as avidly as Swindle. That might have been why they didn't notice how flashbright his hatred burned. Then they took to trying to grind out or willfully ignore the parts imposed into their minds that they recognized as being _other_. It didn't work, but, oh, they gave it their all trying.

Vortex tore his quarters to pieces after botching an Autobot interrogation, shouting abuse at Brawl the whole time; the bruiser's inherent violence had led him to lose his temper, which had been an unforgiveable error at the delicate time it happened. Brawl himself hung back in combat, optics unexpectedly calculating, then shook himself sharply and spent half a shift glaring in concentrated fury at Onslaught. Onslaught ripped Blast Off's chest open in a crazed attempt to tear the shuttle out of himself; the gestalt leader had apparently sneered contemptuous dismissal right in Megatron's face. Astrotrain and Blitzwing restrained him in time, although they hadn't a clue as to what brought on the Combaticon commander's berserker rage. They assumed the earlier beat-down from Megatron had damaged something in Onslaught's head. Blast Off had been most unhelpful when they asked him about it, leading them into an oddly-worded circle of questions-answering-questions that left the triple changers realizing only once he'd left that they'd gotten no answers at all.

The shuttle had walked into the Combaticons' base after that, stoically punched Vortex through a wall, and ordered him to, _"Stay out of my head, or I will kill you."_

Not that they could. The threat rang empty even as Blast Off said it, and the shuttle's body language held a sort of helpless bluff. Vortex looked up at him in weary understanding and didn't bother to respond. Even Brawl, ignorant as he could sometimes be, knew down to his rootmode struts that killing a gestaltmate would be like destroying his own spark. They couldn't do it.

It never occurred to them to wonder why Swindle never reacted. The conmech must have been the most influenced, as a civilian contractor prior to their internment. He'd been thrust into war to fight with reactions and abilities not his own. He wasn't a noncombatant, but he'd never been strictly military, and they should have seen the contrast of _before Detention_ and _after Detention_ in the light of their own problems with the gestalt bonds.

They should have realized, but Swindle never shut up. He complained about the little things. He went on and on about minor irritations until he became a major annoyance in his own right, and they learned to tune him out. He held so close to himself that they assumed the little deceptive twists of thoughts were their own, because the loud, obvious personality he wore had nothing to it of the sly trickster. They dismissed the Swindle they saw and never noticed who slinked through the back of their minds and lent their sparks his devious nature.

They all knew they couldn't kill each other. So they began to adjust to the way things were now, because there wasn't a way to escape it.

It wasn't so bad, really. Not once they accepted their new reality. Vortex started to enjoy using his temper in interrogations, and he deliberately opened himself to Blast Off's influence in direct counterpoint immediately after explosions of anger. His terrifying reputation grew further. Blast Off let Brawl's subprograms guide him in close combat, and Brawl gleefully let him in exchange for a wider perspective on the battlefield as a whole. Brawl let Onslaught's strategies restrain his headstrong nature, and Onslaught, well, the Combaticon leader was a tactician. Using what resources he had was what he did.

They collectively didn't think much of Swindle at all. When they did, it was mostly annoyance. Some anger, a dash of derision, and a little greed for the only thing they thought he brought to the Combaticons: contacts and money.

Except that Swindle had been independent a very, very long time, and he'd resented what this unit had done to and taken away from him for almost as long. Now that they were imposed on him as a gestalt, that resentment congealed into something darker yet. But he knew good business, conmech to the core, so he smiled and laughed. He gave them his greed and his duplicitous thoughts, but on the surface, he dazzled them with shine and flash. A smile always there, a laugh always ready; they greased team dynamics like bribes greasing palms.

He got along with them because he had to, and they never questioned why he never interacted with them. It didn't seem important. After all, killing a gestaltmate was impossible. They were s intertwined, by now the Combaticons had forgotten how to be individuals. The pain to sever that kind of connection was unimaginable.

Swindle had been independent a very long time, but he'd had partners before. Funny, but the new ones never wondered about what happened to the old ones. He really was just that good. He laughed when he met his new friends, and he laughed when he had no more use for them, one way or another. That was the best way to do business. Emotional attachments were painful when severed, but it was a necessary pain.

There was a way to get out of every partnership. He couldn't kill these 'partners,' but that didn't mean he couldn't escape them. It took immersing himself into the bond completely, but the pay-off came, as planned, right after one particularly bad battle. The other four Combaticons dropped offline into statis lock because their core programming trusting the gestalt bond. The gestalt bond that they had all come to trust, relying on it more and more as part of themselves. Their core programming recognized that one of the gestalt was awake, and he would protect them. So the program said, so their gestalt links confirmed, and so Swindle didn't.

He didn't laugh when he got rid of them, but he got rid of them nonetheless.

He sold them, and when they were restored, it came as a total shock to them. The other four Combaticons could only stare in spark-deep confusion at the stranger in their midst. The smile had disappeared. The jovial salesmech mask had dropped when Megatron forced him to bring them back, and what was left wasn't their gestaltmate. At least, not as they knew him, and it shocked them to their cores to realize they had no idea who Swindle was.

They'd come back online to the insincere sniveling of a caught mech, but in the brig, he compacted to a grim, silent shadow of the personae they'd thought they knew. What he really was twisted through them, an oiled snake of treachery that burrowed into their shared sparks. Open hostility flared through the gestalt bonds and burnt like raw wounds scored into their own psyches. It hurt them, and it hurt him too, but he accepted the pain to punish them.

They sent Vortex in to talk to him, because this wasn't questioning a gestaltmate. This was interrogation of a prisoner.

The helicopter looked at the Jeep. The Jeep glared back at the helicopter. The interrogation felt backward, turned on Vortex, before either of them spoke a word.

_"I don't want to die,"_ Swindle said, relaxed about it as only the defeated could be, "_but being a Combaticon...being one of you? I couldn't do it."_ He snorted, and finally looked away.

Vortex unexpectedly felt uneasy, and it took digging into his own spark to find it was an aspect of Swindle himself, ill at ease with telling the truth to a mark. That somehow made it worse as he became aware that Swindle was using the bits of him, Vortex, to manipulate the situation. Vortex had no idea who this mech was, but Swindle had spent years in the bond subtly worming his way through their minds. Now he could turn it back on them, and the other Combaticons didn't even know where to begin with him.

It was scary, finding out part of their own minds had betrayed them, but Swindle only sneered through the bars. _"It was worth a try. Know what I found out?"_ A humorless laugh informed Vortex that he really didn't want to know what Swindle had found out. The Jeep told him anyway. "_I'd have had to take you all back in the end. In a week, two at most, it would have been unbearable. You weren't dead, but you were gone. Here,"_ the Jeep tapped his windshield over his spark chamber, _"where a program flush couldn't stop the ache. Not a pain, but an absence. Like wishing for solid ground under my tires in space. Like being in the box again. You know what I mean?"_

Vortex knew exactly what Swindle described. He intimately knew what he meant. It scored into his mind, and raked through the gestalt links.

The words never left them after that. Even after Swindle sullenly joined the team for real, Vortex felt them remember. It stood between them while they combined: ripples of disquiet over the bonds, a hesitation in the linkages, and the way Swindle never laughed around them again. Ever. The simple words disturbed Vortex every time the conmech flashed that dazzling fake smile at another mark, laughed his phony laugh for the other Decepticons.

"You're not dead, but you're gone," he said to the slowly graying body jumbled on the ground. The linkages he'd snapped to break away from Bruticus' corpse flamed with the pain of a thousand suns, but already the throbbing faded before the numbness spreading over the surface of his spark. Swindle had been right: the pain was bearable. It was the absence that would kill him. "I don't want to die, either."

Swindle didn't answer. In his head, Vortex could imagine what he'd say, however. _"It's worth a try."_ Back to the wall, pinned by spark-deep connection to something he'd hated for four million years, Swindle had still tried. How could Vortex not?

He knelt, and reached behind the shattered windshield. He remembered as hard as he could, applying memories like bandages to the empty spaces gaping inside his own chest. He tried, and all the while he remembered that moment in the brig, and he remembered Swindle's words.

But mostly he remembered the laughter, long after it stopped.


	3. Holding On

**Title: **Holding On

**Warnings: **Gore. Character death, sort of.

**Rating: **PG-13

**Continuity:** G1, Season 3 _After the End_ AU

**Characters:** Vortex, Rumble, Starscream

**Disclaimer: **The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.

**Motivation (Prompt): **_Scenario - unable to let go_

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><p>Starscream had never been one for letting go. Either stubbornness or a greed beyond reason kept him coming back to people and situations that a less emotional mech would have abandoned long ago. He clung to ideas with a weird sort of possessiveness, as if he could claim thoughts.<p>

In another mech, his tenacity would have been labeled stupid. He wasn't, however. Although Autobots and Decepticons alike mocked him by giving him that label, they all knew it be a false title.

Any other mech - a mech who was wrong more often, hadn't outlasted so many for so long, lived so violently and vigorously - would have been stupid. Starscream was just…Starscream. He held wild theories that were proven right despite all prior evidence. He fought pitched battles that seemed lost but were won in the end. He remained at Megatron's side and throat simultaneously. He viciously defended his position as Air Commander and Second-in-Command even when the Decepticon cause seemed lost, Megatron seemed insane, and his very life seemed in danger. He declared himself leader of the Decepticons and kept returning to that declaration again, and again, and _again_.

Nothing could stop him for long. Ambushes, budget cuts, alliances and enemies, Autobots, and even Megatron couldn't silence his defiant shrieking.

Then he died. And the remaining Decepticons on Charr tilted weary looks at the Unicronians gloating over his destruction. Galvatron had destroyed him, but really. Did they honestly think mere death would stop Starscream?

He came back, because he refused to let living go. The Autobots and Decepticons were vaguely surprised that he returned as only a ghost, but not many of them were genuinely taken aback by his continued presence. If anyone could manage to return from the grave, it'd be him. So far as they thought about it, his continued insistence on trying to take over the Decepticons was just the universe's way of saying, "_Yes, it's really Starscream. Yes, he's alive."_

Starscream, the immortal Seeker. The Decepticon who wouldn't die. Or, as Galvatron saw it, the usurper he couldn't kill. It drove Galvatron crazy, but by the time Starscream's return and subsequent chaos had been sorted out, they all had bigger issues to worry about. Not just Galvatron or the Decepticons or even Cybertron; _all_ of them.

When the Quintessons came, survival became the most important worry any of them had. Factions? Rivalries? Dead mechs haunting the living? Those were minor byplays to bring up if they lived through this battle, this ambush, this monstrosity bearing down on them.

This planet tearing apart. This day as a refugee.

These days, now.

On this specific day, Vortex sat on the surface of Eo-36-Niner, and Rumble's fluids turned to powder and grit on his hands. The asteroid colony's atmosphere was thin enough that every liquid but energon itself was vulnerable, and the little Cassetticon was evaporating dry. Vortex didn't know how long it would take for vital systems to fail at this rate, but he assumed not long. There were enough puncture wounds piercing Rumble's airtight lines to cause severe problems in a place with heavier atmosphere. Eo-36-Niner's atmosphere only aggravated already deadly wounds. With any luck, Soundwave would find them just in time to watch the nuisance's spark offline permanently.

The little mech's hands spasmed, still searching for the tiny flecks of red glass that Vortex had ground into the dust. The shards were all that were left of Rumble's optics, plucked from his face while the Cassetticon struggled futilely and screamed curses. Vortex had dropped them to either side of Rumble's head and used his thumbs to crush them irreparably. The pieces were pretty, stark glitters of ruby against the grey frozen ground, but Rumble's shrieks should have stirred some kind of reaction.

Vortex should have felt satisfaction. There should have been a rush of power, or just the temporary placation of idle boredom. He hadn't felt anything, however, not even when he dislocated the little mech's hip joints and spun his rotors on the tiny legs. He hadn't stopped until they'd been riddled with cuts spilling vital fluids into dry piles of powder on the ground. His back ached from the contortion required for that move, and his rotors stung from impact. They hadn't been designed for this kind of abuse.

But he didn't _feel_ it. The physical sensation was there, but it lacked…meaning. Significance. He felt nothing.

He really hadn't thought he would. Nothing else he'd tried had lit sensation under the thick shell of numbness coating his sad, scarred, crippled spark. There was no reason torturing Rumble to death would succeed where interfacing with half the colony's inhabitants or killing a score of Quints had failed.

So Vortex sat, chipped rotor tips in the dirt and powdery hands resting on his knees, and he waited for Soundwave to find him. He waited for the communication mech's visor to witness the death of his last Cassetticon. That red visor would narrow, promising death delivered by vengeful hands, and Vortex wouldn't fight back. There was no point in pretending he didn't want to die. Resisting meant that much less of a chance of dying, so he wouldn't.

He waited with the patience of someone who had nothing else to lose and no other goals left, and while he waited, he thought about Starscream.

The Combaticons were Starscream's, in a twisted way. At first glance, that hardly seemed right. They'd been solidly aligned with Megatron after the reprogramming, dedicated to the warlord with a compulsive loyalty they'd become resigned to. Starscream had been the most persistent traitor in the ranks. It didn't make sense that he would lay claim to a combiner team physically unable to ever be useful to his treachery. Yet he undeniably had.

Because Starscream couldn't let go of what was rightfully his. Never. Not when he should, or even after he was made to. Bruticus had been his creation. The Combaticons had been his idea. They were, in an odd way that only a fixated mind could understand, his responsibility.

Therefore, through his strange logic, they were his. He was the one who harangued them into combat practice. He was the one who came up with the reasoning behind a separate base for the team, and he pitched the concept of the Combaticon HeadQuarters to Megatron and the Constructicons. He was Swindle's default teacher, giving a crash course on Terran politics and culture when the conmech began trading on Earth. Onslaught had no one else to turn to for filling in the gaps in history and military advancements that had happened during their imprisonment in the Detention Center. Vortex went to the arrogant Seeker with his request for an actual interrogation room, because that's who would get him one. Blast Off fell under his command as Air Commander. Duties were flung in Brawl's direction apparently at random, but it kept the brutal Combaticon occupied productively.

Their successes were gloated over as if Starscream were personally accountable for every victory. On the opposite end of the spectrum, failure led to weeks-long harassment as the Seeker blamed them for anything and everything that they'd done wrong. No matter where they went, Starscream was always around the next corner. It had been like another prison sentence.

The Combaticons had grumbled that Starscream was their penance. He'd been almost as bad as four million years in the Detention Center. The Decepticons in general had laughed at them, because the crazy Seeker had his mad fits of obsession. The rest of the army had just been glad it hadn't happened to them this time.

Later, much later, hiding in Pit-damned holes and crammed into any sanctuary they stumbled on, the Decepticons stopped laughing. The Autobots hid with them, factions set aside, the neutrals joined, and _the Quints were coming._ The tentacled slaggers were winning, and every mech lived in seizures of terror that the Sharkicons would take them alive. Death would be a mercy. Reprogramming turned a mech inside-out and mentally gutted everything until only a slave lived on, pained spark picked apart and reassembled as Cybertron's psychotic squid-like slavers wished. The Decepticons - then the Autobots, and then even the neutrals, because they were scrabbling for scraps of hope, any hope, any hope at all - turned desperate optics on the Combaticons.

They stared right back, haggard and run absolutely to the ragged edge by a war they were losing. Just as desperate, the Combaticons clung to their tiny, fragile, tattered shred of hope.

Warriors and refugees alike prayed for Starscream's determination. They called on uncaring Primus that the ghost of an Air Commander would suffer a twinge of responsibility and remember his precious combiner team. The sad remnants of factions and planets pinned their hopes on one dead mech returning to warn of compromised locations, incoming fleets, or the Quint's latest abomination. The Seeker was dead but not gone, and the only link anyone else had to his otherworldly ability to gather information was his claim to Decepticon leadership - and five Decepticons who had hated his wings when he'd been alive.

Now, the Combaticons felt strange surges of gratitude when their old tormentor dropped hints. Their sparks lit up with silly bits of affection when he appeared for a day or two to stand in their midst like a reminder that they hadn't been forgotten. They weren't defeated yet. They existed, still. Someone hadn't given up, and wouldn't give up, and at least one piece of the universe hadn't changed.

_Yes, it's really Starscream. Yes, he's alive._

_No, you're not dead yet._

Galvatron was executed, a raving madmech who had been completely crazy but a strong fighter, and things went from bad to worse. Entire bases were overwhelmed. Whole groups disappeared without a trace, only to show up fighting under the Quints' control. Their hollow optics and spitted sparks haunted Cybertron as the free mechs fought and fled and fell. The bottoms dropped out of everyone's tanks every time a flutter of radar passed over them. Panic swept the shivering survivors. They clutched their weaponry when somebody thought they saw a blot in the sky, a light among the stars, a dark shape against space. They were living on borrowed time.

The Decepticons proclaimed that Starscream did indeed rule them, because pride was something no one could afford anymore. A dead leader who could keep them alive one more day was worth more to the living Decepticons than fighting to fill a position. Why fight to lead when the Quintessons had an execution order on any mech who dared head a resistance? All hail Starscream.

_Please don't let us die._

For a little while, just long enough to hope to sprout, it worked. Starscream was here and there: a word left with one Swindle's bribed contacts, pale like he'd seen a specter; a message left traced on the dust of a computer monitor in an outpost that hadn't had power in eons; the cold sweep of recent memory through Skyfire's mind, remembering things he hadn't seen and people he didn't know; Perceptor's hands working while the scientist's optics glowed faintly red. It was never anything concrete. No actual leader stood forth and commanded them. There was nothing stable and no one present to rely on, but Starscream hadn't be dependable even when he'd had a body.

The ghost of a mech led them. He remembered his faction and what a leader owed it, and he did what he could with what he had left. It wasn't much, but it was more than they'd dared hope for. They began to push the Quintessons back. They weren't winning, but they were still _fighting_. The wreckage of Cybertron was perfect for guerilla warfare. That was fortunate, because there weren't enough free Cybertronians left for outright battle.

But then the Quints found out about Starscream…and Starscream disappeared.

"What happened?" Vortex asked, not really curious but making conversation to pass the time until he himself died.

The pale figure who'd appeared beside him waved one hand. "They managed to snare me in a corporeal body."

Vortex doubted it had been a snare as much as a bargain. Starscream would have negotiated with Unicron for a body if the evil planet-killer had offered. "They kept you?"

Starscream reached out to touch Rumble, transparent fingers dipping into the Cassetticon's body as if to assess the damage. The wounds continued to leak sluggish pools of grit; the thin trickle of particles hitting the growing pile whispered like sliding metal. "Oh, yes. We had an agreement: I was left to my own devices, and they didn't try to enslave me." No other mech would have casually admitted to working with the Quints, but Starscream made it sound like no big deal. For him, it probably hadn't been.

For all his stubborn clinging and twisted sense of responsibility, no one would mistake Starscream as loyal. His loyalty was intensely personal and belonged to one mech: himself.

Which…didn't explain why the last thing Bruticus remembered hearing was a familiar, frantic warning shriek. From there, Bruticus had shattered forever into stuttering linkages and dead mechs, but Vortex remembered that memory. That, Vortex could recall clearly. Starscream had been there. Starscream had come back. Starscream had tried to warn _his_ combiner team.

Just like Starscream had come for him here. For Vortex, the last Combaticon to die. Starscream was here, at the very end.

He never let go. Not even when he wanted to.

Vortex looked down, washing one hand over and over the other until powdered liquids drifted down onto his knees in a fine, silty rain. "What's it like? Death."

Asking cause something - he strained, a half-whine caught in his vocalizer – to stir thickly under the numbness of his spark. The congealed, solid ball that had been his spark shuddered in his chest. It should hurt and instead took all sensation _away_. It _almost felt._ That almost made it worse than not feeling anything. That just reminded him of what he no longer had the ability to have.

The last things transmitted from the other Combaticons had been terror. A little rage, but mostly Bruticus' intense fear that washed out into nothing. Vortex had come online with a lingering impression of being scared. The pain of his linkages endlessly trying to connect hadn't been as frightening as feeling the other side of the connection slip away. Swindle's mind had already flatlined when he'd forced that last connection on the conmech; no conscious thought had remained as the spark guttered out into oblivion. Vortex had been afraid he'd be dragged down into death with the other Combaticons, but he'd been more afraid to be left alone. Even then, he'd known what was coming.

Vortex could have lived with pain. Fear, even, was a way of living. Not a very good one, but better than the slow seepage of nothing he had instead.

It had started with a slight glaze of numbness, the pain receding and leaving nothing in its wake. It was like the opposite of healing. It was scar tissue where there had been nerve endings. It had thickened and hardened and begun shutting him away in a box just like the Detention Center had — but this time, Vortex was still functioning. His body walked and flew and he couldn't reach it. The sensors were all in working order, but he was trapped in a shell under the armor. It was as if his body had become a display on a screen, readings listed down his HUD, and he was denied access to it. A video game body instead of real life. Cut him open, pull his spark out, and he'd know it was happening, but he'd feel nothing.

It was all beyond his grasp, and he'd do anything anything _anything_ to escape. He'd tried everything he could think of, begged everyone for help, and they couldn't. They'd tried, and they couldn't, and there was no way out of his private prison.

Death was coming now, because it was the only route left. It was either that, or shoot himself in the head. Vortex couldn't bring himself to do that. Yet, anyway.

The ghostly Seeker gave him an odd look for his question, habitual contempt lightening to a quizzical wonder. "It's a little late to ask that, don't you think?"

The superior tone should have been irritating. He should have felt annoyed at the patronizing pat given to his shoulder, even if Starscream's hand went right through his armor instead of touching it. Maybe he should have even felt a little wistful. Nostalgia for better times when Starscream pulled rank or taunted him with something the Combaticons needed, right?

But Vortex only shrugged. He didn't really know why he'd never asked. No, wait, he did. Death had been something everyone avoided talking about during the Quintesson War. It was a stupid superstition, but they'd studiously avoided bringing the topic up with Starscream whenever he manifested. Many of them had wanted to ask, but not-asking had blossomed into a strange taboo. What happened after death? Why did Starscream alone come back? The questions weren't worth possibly cursing themselves. The ghost was their good luck charm, stupid as that sounded, and desperate mechs didn't jinx those.

The odd look deepened. "Why do you ask now?"

"The others died afraid." He looked at his now-clean hands, wishing vaguely that he felt anything about Rumble dying. Or about his own death for that matter. "I'm not afraid. Do you think that will make a difference?"

Starscream blinked, and for a moment his whole body shimmered in and out of sight. He seemed to be thinking hard. "…yes, Vortex. It will make a difference."

"Oh. That's…good." He didn't really care, but it was conversation. A way to pass the time. Soundwave had to come soon. "How so?"

"You fool," whispered through the thin atmosphere, a furious hiss turned on the last Combaticon, and Vortex looked up at Starscream in confusion. The ghost stood over Rumble's body and glared down at the helicopter as if blaming him for ignorance. "Death is like life. You die as you live." The Seeker spread his arms, transparent wings raised in defiance against the universe and its expectations. "Save for the lack of body, do I **seem** any different than I was? You utter **glitch**! You're going to **die** as you are, and you're going to **be dead** like that. And for most mechs," his voice dropped back down from the near-screech it had risen to and leveled into a solemn tone, "death is forever. Do you really think you'll be like me?"

A look approaching pity crossed pale features as Starscream watched Vortex's visor widen in realization. "You are going to be 'not afraid' for the rest of eternity, Vortex."

They looked at each other for a long moment, the only sound the soft metallic _tink_ as liquid evaporated to powder and dribbled to the ground.

"…oh." Vortex's voice was tiny. He seemed a little distant, visor casting about as if looking for a way to refute this new knowledge. Sudden tension bunched him from relaxed into a coiled bundle of nervous energy. Joints flexed and froze with indecision, pinning him where he sat. "That's — oh."

An eternity of being like this. Death as a condemnation, not a relief. The abrupt change in perspective gave his mind reeling whiplash, and Vortex found that he'd buried his hands in the grey dirt like he was reaching for a solution underground. The motion was like Rumble weakly searching the ground for broken optical lenses: it wouldn't help, but his processors grabbed the idea because the situation allowed for no viable solution.

Soundwave was coming.

Heaving air he no longer had to intake, Starscream crouched down to catch the helicopter's wild gaze. A trapped animal gaze, but Vortex's dumb terror was buried far, far under unfeeling comprehension. Vortex understood, but he was almost beyond the point where he could feel anything about it - and that was the scariest part for the helicopter.

The ghost gave him a sardonic look. "I take it that wasn't your plan?"

"Primus, no. No. I don't — I can't. No." Vortex's hands groped, reaching out for help, for anything. "What do I…I don't even…no…"

Starscream sneered at his neediness and avoided the grabby hands out of sheer spite. "You are a complete idiot." He stood — or rather, he disappeared and reappeared on his feet — and looked down at him. His optics burnt a red deep enough to look almost solid with the cold disdain of a dead mech watching the living throw life away. "I suppose it comes down to a simple question, Vortex." His body gradually faded away, but he waited until the red visor finally turned to look up at him before bending down, near-solid optics contemptuous. He spat the words in the helicopter's face as he disappeared completely: "Do you want to die?"

Vortex sat staring at where Starscream had been, and the question spun dizzying whorls through his head. His knees clunked forward, pitching him to the ground. He curled over them, hands clawing over the sides of his helm and face grinding into the grit. Powder puffed from under him and settled again, coating him lightly in Rumble's evaporated vital fluids, and still the words tore through his mind.

_Do you want to die?_

It wasn't a question. It was a judgment, and Vortex -

He was crawling through red glass, visor tracking all the pieces of Rumble's optics as his shaking hands reached out for the Cassetticon. He knew how to take a mech apart, and not enough about how to put one back together. Not enough, not with the thin atmosphere and so many holes. Soundwave was coming, and he was going to _die_, and Vortex -

- and Vortex -

"I don't want to die," he said aloud, clinging to what he knew he should feel, to what he _had_ to feel, and when Soundwave finally, finally found them, he was unable to make the last Combaticon let go.


	4. StringTangled Fingers

**Title: **String-Tangled Fingers

**Warning: **Angst.

**Rating:**G

**Continuity:**G1, Season 3, _After the End_ AU

**Characters:** Vortex, Soundwave, Combaticons

**Disclaimer: **The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.

**Motivation (Prompt): **_"To remember you've forgotten something" _and, from a prompt post,_ "bleak despair"_

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><p><strong>[* * * * *]<strong>

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><p>What Vortex remembered most vividly was forgetting things.<p>

It didn't hurt, but that was almost the worst part. Vortex sat against the wall in the Mars' base repairbay, rotor hub presses flat to his back and hands endlessly twining about each other, and he forgot.

He forgot the savage glee of combat, amped up but moronically violent. Vortex knew the way Brawl had thought, had even come to relish the smash of dumb, physical domination a good fight had brought out in the bruiser. Brute force had triumphed over thought on the gut level where cerebral processors short-circuited under the intensity. Vortex had the shared memories of fists denting metal and the sounds of armor breaking.

The memories were cored, however, hollowed of actual sensation. Vortex was left with the haunting knowledge that he remembered something incomplete. He held onto Brawl's mind only to discover the tank's past emptied of meaning. Brawl's memory was like a missile silo with no missile inside. Brawl, like the other Combaticons, had disappeared so completely not even the ache of broken gestalt links remained.

"_Who took __them from me?"_ he wanted to demand. "_Give them back!"_

There wasn't anyone left to confront with his demands. Only Soundwave with his impassive visor, towering over him as he ordered the helicopter back to a repair berth. Vortex stared at him blankly for a full klik before the words processed. Standing up seemed like far too much effort, but he couldn't find it in himself to argue. Arguing took the decisiveness to take a stance, and he'd forgotten how to do that.

He got up, but the open space at his back was a sudden, gaping vulnerability. There was only one mech on base to serve as makeshift medic, and Vortex cringed as Soundwave's rage turned to follow him. There wasn't much his numbed spark could feel anymore, but the crawling sense of terror remained. Even after the actual emotion sapped away, the memory stayed fresh.

Vortex didn't want to die. Yet Soundwave had every reason to kill him.

The helicopter edged forward, fumbling baby steps chivvied along by the looming fury at his back. He imagined the base's defacto medic/commander taking the shot. _Bam_, right in the back. Would his numbed spark even feel the killing shot? He felt a sick certainty that he'd welcome death if only he'd feel it coming.

But Starscream had assured him that wouldn't happen. Had informed him that death would be condemnation, not relief.

The only thing more horrifying that the sensory-deprivation box his own spark had become was the idea of never, ever getting out of that box.

So Vortex hunched his shoulders and shuffled along in front of the frigidly angry communication mech. He carefully stayed close to the back wall of the repairbay and aimed for the last berth in the row. The first berth in the repairbay - the furthest from him and that's how far away he was going to stay, thank you very much - held a tiny Cassetticon who might not make it through another night.

Vortex had done his level best to keep Rumble alive, but that was only after first doing his worst to the little mech. He didn't regret trying to kill the Cassetticon, but he was well aware he wouldn't live a klik longer than Rumble if the tiny mech offlined. Soundwave had every reason to shoot him and be done with it.

It wasn't like Soundwave didn't know his weak spots. He'd been in and out of repairbays so often since Bruticus went down that nobody ever got around to assigning him quarters. If it wasn't for scans on his spark, it was for repairs from self-inflicted wounds or goaded fights.

Soundwave - and before him, the Constructicons - had done everything in their power to keep Vortex from going under. There weren't enough mechs left after the Quintesson Wars to give up on one. Even one like Vortex.

The surviving Cybertronians were stubborn like that. Every one of them mattered, these days. They'd survived when all odds said they shouldn't have, and, like Vortex, they didn't want to die.

Vortex didn't want to die. Even when he had difficulty remembering precisely why. No, he _remembered_, but there was more to memory than data input.

He remembered destroying Autobot installations from orbit, and the precision sniping afterward as the ruins erupted into mad scuttling like a kicked beehive. He remembered the orders, but the vague amusement he knew should be behind the shots was gone. The sense of accomplishment, a distant satisfaction for a job well done - it just wasn't there.

The motivation was gone. Why had the memories mattered? He'd known, once. Blast Off had taken his muted emotions to the grave. There were memories scattered about in Vortex's head like the heatshields and thrusters tumbled on the ground where Bruticus had fell, but the uniting factor had gone.

In the past, Vortex had sometimes drawn on the shuttle's aloofness. He'd pulled on the foreign, cool apathy to chill his own manic glee, but it was all gone now. The calm whorl of Blast Off's spark had pinched off, and now the wound had scabbed over.

Vortex sat on the repair berth and wondered what Blast Off would have done. Soundwave shoved his chest as if he couldn't stand touching him, and the helicopter meekly laid back. Compliance was easier than fighting. Vortex could still find it in himself to grasp desperately at memories of emotion, but actually dredging up his own was becoming impossible.

He pictured his spark growing a shell. First a spray of mesh over the surface, like cosmic rust infecting a new host. Complicated traceries followed circuits under the plating, or rather, ran struts and girders in armored framework around his spark. Then the delicate branches sprouted from each line, connecting and blooming and spreading into a transparent scum. Hardening slowly, letting less and less wriggle through the solidifying mass until the shell sealed completed.

The memories, the data, were trapped in Vortex's mind. Isolated within, however, there were no personalities or passions. Just leftover information in a leftover mech.

Soundwave roughly strapped Vortex down, handling his wrists and ankles with only the briefest of disdainful touches. The helicopter didn't struggle. Being restrained, wrists bound by his head and forearms pressing his rotors into the berth, well, he couldn't say it was pleasant. He also couldn't say it was unpleasant. To be honest, he didn't feel much at all about it.

He felt…fragmented. The Constructicons - and, later, Soundwave - had run deep defragments and sorting scans, but Vortex's cortex had come up clean. The methodless jitter of data jangled endlessly from the broken gestalt links, not from his own head, like phantom pains from the limbs of dead mechs. The memory files weren't really present, they belonged to other minds, but they plagued Vortex in constant pings of gestalt transmissions.

Five lives full of memories were packed into his head, but they were delusions and chaos. There was no organization, no rhyme or reason to the madness. The central purpose of every memory was missing, and, disconnected, the memories of five Combaticons fell apart inside him. Vortex no less than the others, but he wasn't dead yet. Not like the others.

Please, no, not like them.

Vortex didn't want to die. He thought, floundering in formless memory, that was the only thing keeping him together at all.

His was the last spark. Five minds of forgotten memories, four dead Combaticons, one living spark. The world was held distant, detached and perceived through a thick shell. Being strapped down was less of a lockdown than what he endured already.

Soundwave pointedly moved a partition between Vortex and the rest of the repairbay, blocking him out that much more. The helicopter just turned his head toward the back wall and stared sightlessly at his own arm.

Onslaught wouldn't have tolerated this. He'd have come up with a plan the moment Bruticus fell. Vortex could remember how the tactician's mind had prickled, always on the verge of something new and devastating. An attack formation in a long-ago battle; a small operation at an outpost; a sting on an Autobot convoy. The first impressions and meticulous files that had assembled a disparate group of four mechs into a combat unit. The past that had forged a solitary mech into one of the greatest tactical minds the Decepticons had possessed.

Vortex wanted to possess Onslaught's mind. He wanted the feel of that spark surging through the gestalt links, pushing the Combaticons into a cohesive whole outstripping their combined form. Onslaught had turned loyalty programming in an asset, virtual enslavement into opportunity. It hadn't just been his logical mind, but the drive behind his cold thoughts -

- but the mind was gone. The spark had extinguished. Vortex had that which had made up his team leader's mind, to no avail. Onslaught swam through the bedlam inside his head, but _he_ wasn't there. There were millions of years of memories, but nothing of Brawl, Blast Off, or Onslaught. The impressions in his thoughts had been left behind by their deaths, but that hadn't left anything of _them_.

A million memories drowning him, but not a single emotion to save him. Vortex held on to them, dwelled in them, squeezed for every drop of remembered passion or motivation he could wring from the dry data - and still, his encased spark forgot them orn by orn.

The helicopter stared at nothing, and saw too much. He was motionless, but scrambled for what was left. He was silent, but wished he could dig up enough of something, anything, to scream.

No matter how he searched, there was nothing of Swindle. There were flashes of cunning, disorienting moments of clever ploys, but no Swindle. Around the edges of three dead Combaticons' memories, bits and pieces of a fourth hid and ran. It would have been frustrating if Vortex were able to rouse that much emotion. As it was, he passively accepted what he couldn't change.

He thought, in the numbness of his very being, that if he could only catch the fleeting hints of the conmech, he'd capture the greed and defiance that had run so deep through the other. In his more despairing moments, he thought that was exactly why he couldn't find the slick conmech anymore. Swindle had given the Combaticons only his hatred, deception, greed, and defiance. Stripped of those feelings, there was nothing substantial underneath to hold onto.

Three dead Combaticons inside one head, and another reluctantly on the fringes. The pale echo of someone who called himself Vortex clung to them. Like any survivor, like every survivor, he helplessly demanded of the universe, "_Who took them from me?"_ He forgot, and remembered forgetting, and felt his hold on his past, on his sanity, on his self - it slipped a little more._ "Give them back!"_

Like a shadow into oncoming night, the fleeting memory of Swindle ghosted around the faded edges of Brawl, Blast Off, and Onslaught, and it whispered as it went away, _"You never had me."_

It didn't hurt. It should have, but it didn't, and by the time the Autobots came for him, all Vortex remembered was that he'd forgotten something that had once been important. Important, but lost to him.

And the subtle sound of laughter tormented his caged spark, hollow as a Pyrrhic victory.


	5. Eschatology, Interrupted

Life keeps going after the Apocalypse. Vortex doesn't want to die, even when he should.

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><p><strong>Title: <strong>Eschatology, Interrupted

**Warning: **Overblown prose, angst, death

**Rating: ** PG?

**Continuity: **G1, Season 3 - _After the End_ AU

**Characters: **Spike Witwicky, Perceptor, Vortex

**Disclaimer: **The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.

**Motivation (Prompt): **_"There's something out there ..."_

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><p>[* * * * *]<br>**The world isn't over, yet, and so Spike will step back from that ledge. **

[* * * * *]

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><p>Earth had survived the Quintessons.<p>

This was not so insignificant a thing. Cybertron, after all, had not. So despite the bitter-laced non-triumph of it, it _was_ a statement worth making. This roundish chunk of spinning solid matter still had atmosphere, a working ecosystem, and most of its major features still intact. It surface might have been rendered uninhabitable in some areas, whole species of living creatures exterminated from its surface, but it would be human arrogance to claim that Earth itself hadn't survived. It would even be a mistake to say that humankind hadn't survived.

"The End of Days has come!" cried the crazed men, wild-eyed in the ruins of the cities. "We are undone!" wept the women in the fortified compounds the survivors constructed.

That was a broad generalization, when really the details were as merciless but left shell-shocked pieces of mankind still alive. In reality, on the large scale and in the wider picture, mankind would make it. It was on the small scale that the individuals suffered and the percentages added up.

"Sterile," said Perceptor, optics weary. "The majority of North America, Europe, and Asia have lost its reproductive abilities to the biological warfare engendered by the Quintessons' first invasion. Children between the ages of six and twelve years of age may have escaped absorbing the worst dosages into their pre-pubescent reproductive organs; only time will tell." The blue of his optics dimmed, and the ache behind them betrayed his dispassionate voice. "Children under the age of five succumbed to the initial sweep of diseases, as did fetuses in the womb. Most pregnant women died when the mutations and blood rot crossed the placental barrier. For 95% of the men and women on the affected continents, sterility and associated physical and psychological disorders will be a greater cause of death than natural causes, including lack of consumable food or water."

Spike's laughter was nothing more than a charred rasp, the humor long since burnt from his hollow voice. "That's a natural cause, now?"

The Autobot scientist looked down at him, but the pain in his optics blotted the human from his vision. Some failures were so spectacular that a mech couldn't handle another reminder, and Perceptor's traumatized mind simply could no longer see Spike. "Compared to the other causes, yes."

Sadly, he was right. Mass graves and piles of corpses filled the world, and rare were the bodies killed by something as relatively natural as starvation or old age. Violence accounted for far too many of the survivors, fighting out of despair, paranoia, or directionless hatred. Sometimes they fought over resources or out of nothing but fear, because cooperation had died alongside understanding and compassion. Intense nuclear fallout rendered many of the highest-yield agricultural areas radioactive for years to come, which didn't stopped ignorant, desperate humans from harvesting from the deadly ground. Governments didn't exist to stop them, and there were no more networks to spread education or awareness about what was unseen but fully capable of killing them. The Autobots helped where and when they could, guilt driving them to offer whatever they could, but the news they brought the survivors was never good.

For most people, moving to a different area wasn't an option. Where would they go? Somewhere else, where it was worse? Yes, this area was a deathtrap. But there wasn't an area on the East Coast, on the Mediterranean Sea, in China, _anywhere_ that was any better, and the Quint-engineered diseases would wipe them out wherever they went even if they did survive the rigors of post-apocalyptic travel.

For whole swathes of the world's surface, the current generation of humans living there would be the last. The planet had begun the Quint Wars with more than six billion humans. It'd ended the Wars with less than three billion. If the number sounded high enough there could be hope, an optimistic chance for rebuilding, it didn't take into account how many were sick, old, injured, or merely hanging on until their weak grasp pried free. That number dropped every day. Drastically, depending on how badly the weather stirred biological agents or radioactive particles into the air that day.

Earth had survived the Quintessons, but human civilization had not.

"The End of Days!" was the prophets' creed, preaching as if the world was over. "Undone!" proclaimed the women, like they were all that made up the planet.

Spike listened to their words and knew that they rang untrue. There was more to Earth than humankind. There always had been, but never more than now, when refugees from another world sought shelter here. They had started out differently, inhabitants of another world, but they were Terrans now. The other world was gone. This was the only home they had, now.

So he returned to the Autobots, and he didn't acknowledge their guilt. He didn't absolve the Cybertronians of responsibility, but only God could judge who had ultimately killed his wife, his son, and most of their race. For himself, he chose to blame the Quintessons. It was enough, because these days, it felt all the more important to represent those who called his planet home: the dead and the dying and the living. Because the Earth had survived, and the responsibility he owed her therefore had as well. He was still the ambassador between Autobots and humans.

Familiar faces froze as he walked up the rutted road they'd eked out of the remains of the highway leading to the old _Ark_ site. He was a human approaching a race his kind raged at, and they didn't know what to do in reaction. The Decepticons backed away, openly uncomfortable, because it was one thing to conquer a world but another to try and quietly settle it. The Autobots leaned forward, straining to help but already flinching back from the hot sting of rejection.

He only hauled off the hazmat suit's helmet to bare his own grief-ravaged face to them, these awkward foster children of another world, standing before a lone human like they hoped for adoption, or at least a cessation of hostilities. Standing in peace because there'd been too much war, and they just wanted it to be _over_.

Some turned away, unable to face him, or rather, unable to face what he reminded them of. Some just stared, unable to believe he'd come back, shocked that he'd somehow dodged death to return. Others accepted him, welcomed him back with a gratitude that bordered on anguish. Autobot and Decepticon alike, Terrans all; just survivors and refugees like any other left in the world.

The makeshift colony felt more like home than anywhere else, but that wasn't saying much. Spike's home hadn't survived the Quintessons any more than his family had.

Maybe that's why he listened to the prophets and the women. He knew they were wrong, but they were also right. Out there in the rubble of cities and homes, ruined lives carried painted placards or wailed their messages aloud, and their civilization would soon be no more. In the colony, refugees from the stars built the foundations for a society mankind no longer had, and they would live. Both were equally right, and equally wrong. Earth had survived, but Spike had still buried it with his wife and son in ashy gravesites, undone and ended.

In the ruins of a city, much later, Vortex asked him, "Why did you come back?"

Spike looked out over the destroyed buildings, and he knew the Decepticon wasn't asking about walking up that road to the _Ark_. There was more to Earth than humans or Autobots, and more to his return than forgiveness or understanding. It wasn't about helping the Autobots anymore than listening to madmen rave was about believing their ranting words. It was about survival, and loyalty.

He sat here today with someone else who should have died and continued to live, but on Earth, that didn't mean that they'd beaten the odds. Looking at it a certain way, they were all dying every day, coming undone until the very end. The world had died, but it still survived. Those on her just lingered, standing in the limbo at the bitter edge until something finally pushed them over.

"There's something out there," Spike said at last, "worth coming back for."


	6. Reflections

**Script Title: **Reflections

**Warning to Audience: **Angst?

**Show Rating: ** G

**Continuity Stage: **G1, _After the End_ AU

**Characters: **Vortex, Hoist, Blades

**Theatre Disclaimer: **The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.

**Acting Motivation (Prompt): **_"Alter-ego"_

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><p>[* * * * *]<br>** Smoke and mirrors, and glimpses of reality in between.**

[* * * * *]

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><p>The Autobots were gentler than he'd expected. Then again, he hadn't had many expectations to begin with, so he didn't know why the lack of pain felt off. The hand on his chest, the touches on his shoulder, the lack of a knock or two about the helm; none of it sat right with him, although he couldn't say why. It could have been nostalgia for the Constructicons, perhaps, although he didn't remember them with anything approaching fondness. He recalled their professional callousness numbly, just as he viewed the small Autobot pulling on his arm with a dull sort of apathy.<p>

The gentleness was wrong, but not wrong enough to make him do more than notice it. He thought about it, then let it slip away. It wasn't important.

"Vortex, are you listening? Vortex, I need you to sit here. Good. Right there. Can you stay there?"

The little mech pulling him around sure talked a lot. That was okay. Not really, but he didn't have any reason to stop the Autobot, so it was okay by default. He had even less reason to not go where the hand on his arm took him. It was just easier to follow, just as it was easier to tolerate the talking than make the mech shut up. Since he wasn't paying attention to the chatter anyway, the background noise just blended into a vaguely annoying white noise that let him know time had passed. He didn't know how much time, but time.

Vortex found that he tended to…drift. Sometimes there was noise. Sometimes there were hands pushing on his shoulders, pushing him down into a seat, and a klik later he wondered if he'd imagined it, except that he was sitting down. The noise swept in and out again, niggling at the edge of his consciousness but never biting in. It passed over him, and it went away.

He didn't know how much time had passed, but eventually the lone Combaticon realized he was staring across a room. A not-room type of room. It looked like someone's interior. This was the inside of a spacefaring mech, probably, if the Autobots were taking him away from Soundwave and his mauled Cassetticon. Since he hadn't been executed, that seemed to be the only other solution. Vortex was being banished to a different colony, and right now he was in transit. The transformation seams meant he was onboard someone. Someone whose interior he was looking across.

Not the interior of - not who he'd been thinking of. Whoever that had been, but the blank spots in his memory took away the person's name before he could remember it beyond a rusty ache under the smooth plain his mind had become. Smooth and featureless, without a single ripple of emotion to catch his intermittent observations or bring up anything significant for him to remember. It just stretched from one side of his mind to the other, like his head had become a two-dimensional image someone slowly wrote his thoughts out onto. He read them, blinked, and they were erased away.

There was someone sitting across from him, red and white and sad all over. That struck him as odd, because he didn't seem like the type who should be sad. Angry, maybe. Angry seemed like a better emotional fit, and the faintest urge to provoke barely broke the surface before it went back down. A ripple or two uneasily stirred his mind, but they smoothed back out as if they'd never been. The red and white mech didn't react. He sat there across from him, and Vortex continued to stare at him because there was nothing else to do and little enough cause to look away.

Shadows he idly recognized as Autobots stood and moved about the spacecraft, coming between them numerous times, but it was so hard to focus on them. His thoughts traced out slowly on the smooth surface, never sinking in and unable to keep up with their quick motions. His head gradually turned, following someone who'd strode by kliks ago, and a tiny ripple of confusion sloshed across his mind when he couldn't see who he'd been…had he been looking for someone? Who? His head turned, just as slow, to look across the room through the shadows, but there was no one there.

The shadows writhed and squirmed, opaque and transparent in turns like dense smoke, or images processed long after the source moved on. They talked and talked, but he only sometimes listened to what they said.

" - rtex? Come on, chap, up and at 'em! Time to stand up. Let go of the seat. Sky Lynx needs it. Vortex, stand up. There. Now, this way, please. One step at a time, old boy."

The pull came again, long and persistent enough that he went with it because the other options seemed too troublesome, and the spacefarer's interior went away. Or Vortex left it. Either way, he came to be outside, but it wasn't an outside he wanted to be outside in. He should have done something…else. Whatever else he could have done, that he hadn't. Oh, well. Too late now.

The light harshly blinded him until he stumbled, and the chatter picked up.

" - not turning down his optical sensors. Vortex, you have to look away from the sun. Vortex, follow my hand. Can you see my hand?"

A shadow waved against the light, blooming rings of darkness around its periphery. It was so _fast_. Vortex numbly watched it, thoughts finally catching up and identifying that it was a hand. He lost it when it disappeared in a trail of dim moving shade-shapes, only for it to return. The shadows wavered until his thoughts labeled it a hand again, and he watched it because he had no reason not to. It moved downward, slow and steady, and he tracked it absently. After a while, he noticed that the blinding glare had stopped. That was nice. He hadn't liked not being able to see.

At least, as much as he liked or didn't like anything. Opinions scrawled across the smooth surface of his mind, sank in, and left not a trace behind. He thought that should bother him, but the tail end of the thought finished as the beginning erased away, and he no longer remembered what he'd been thinking a moment later.

He didn't see where the hand he'd followed had gone, but there were a lot of shadows about, and soon he forgot about it. One particular shadow kept getting in his way, pushing and pulling and directing him. He went where it seemed to want him to go, mostly because resisting wasn't worth the effort. Resisting it. An Autobot. He thought so, anyway, maybe, but he kept losing sight of the mech who talked and talked. The mech vanished, and there was just a determined shadow that sometimes repeated words he understood. But then the shadow was an Autobot, until the movement outpaced Vortex's short, slow thoughts. The words became white noise again, and the shadow flitted away.

" - ttle response. His systems are all online, but, well, this is a bit of a fix. Not sure what I can do for the poor fellow besides make him comfortable. From what Soundwave said, they've already tried everything I've got on hand."

Shadows weren't supposed to always _move_ like this, were they? The constant movement made him somewhat dizzy. He didn't mind. It was okay. Not really, but since he didn't care to try and stop the shadows, it was okay enough.

" -ar me? Vortex? Lay down, please. No?"

After a while, Vortex started to wonder if he should have responded to the last round of push/pulls. Or had it been the last round? There might have been more afterward. He hadn't resisted, but it hadn't seemed worth responding to, either. He didn't remember.

After even longer, he realized he was in a room again. This time, it didn't look like somebody's interior. Not - anyone he knew, if he knew anyone. This was just a room. With repair berths, so the thought meandered across his blank mind that he'd been sent back to Soundwave, but no. There were other patients here. Red, and white, and blue patients. Autobot patients, and the colony on Eo-36-Niner didn't had many Autobots. Decepticons, some Neutrals, but the Autobots had mostly moved on to Earth. It wasn't that the Decepticons were very warlike anymore, but peace was easier if the two factions just stayed separate.

Old grudges died hard, even in the face of total annihilation. He'd fought beside Autobots in the Quint Wars, but he hadn't wanted to live with them afterward. Vortex didn't mind these Autobots, however. Unlike the shadows that burred noise and blurred movement, they lay still. So very still. It was oddly restful. Oddly hypnotic, too. The longer he looked at them, the less he noticed the distracting shadows.

If he were as still as they were, maybe the shadows would stop for a while. He thought their dim trails of shade-shapes and sharp black rings might leave him alone. He wasn't precisely tired, but the interruptions weren't restful. It was okay, but only because he couldn't make himself care enough otherwise. If he could sink down, stop thinking, then everything would just go away. The shadows and the white noise would go away, and it would all be okay. Really okay, not just tolerable.

A perfect spike of alarm broke the surface of Vortex's smooth center, and for a second, peaceful rest was the _last_ thing he wanted.

For that second, the still forms on the berths were Protectobots, the room was an isolation ward, and the shadow in front of him was an Autobot medic. The little green one, what's-his-face, the one Vortex had always wanted to interrogate because he knew all the nitty-gritty everyday details of every Autobots' body inside and out -

" - ex. Vortex."

His visor lit a brilliant red, and the Combaticon's head jerked back. "I - !"

The second ended. The spike faltered and subsided.

The Autobot flickered, like an after-image of a photograph, and the shadow murmured its white noise again.

When Vortex's processor wandered around to it again, the room was free of shadows. There were only mechs of blue and red and white, lying very still, who were easy to watch. So he did, looking at them because moving took thought, and thought was far too difficult to attempt right now. He didn't think about why they were lying there, or who they reminded him of. The colors were all wrong, anyway. Maybe. He didn't remember, actually.

There was another shape, sitting like his mirror-image across the motionless room. Mirror-image, but not the same. Vortex had never been red, white, or sad. The rotor blades were different, too. The same, but different. Opposites with strange similarities and familiar differences: a mouth instead of a face mask, a red emblem instead of a purple one, blue optics instead of a red visor.

When those optics looked up, they actually _saw_ him. Saw him and recognized him, which was more than his mirror-image could do in return.

"At least they're not dead," Blades whispered.

Vortex only gazed loosely in his direction, because it was true. Everything about them was the same, but different.


	7. Broken Mirrors

** Title: ** Broken Mirrors

**Warning****s****: **Angst, desperation, and wrongness.

**Rating: ** PG

**Continuity: **G1, _After the End_ AU

**Characters: **Blades, Vortex, Hoist

**Disclaimer: **The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.

**Motivation (Prompt): **_Scenario: a vision or hallucination_Auction fic

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><p><strong>[* * * * *]<strong>

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><p>The shadows multiplied.<p>

They weren't shadows, but Vortex had nothing else to compare them to. A visual distortion implied hardware error, and a hallucination would have tripped error warnings in his software. The _change_ swept over his surroundings like fog creeping across the inside of his visor. It was a haze obscuring his vision, except that it wasn't physical. It'd taken an entire orn to convince him of that, back on the moon with Soundwave watching him obsessively check room lights and polishing his visor. The gradual dimming wasn't a problem with his optical sensors, nor the base lights. It'd taken Soundwave a dozen patient repetitions, speaking firmly to the confused helicopter until it finally sank in. The makeshift medic had patiently tested the sensors behind his visor one by one, and they came up as functional. He'd even replaced a few of the mech's sensors with some of his own, swapping them to demonstrate to the Combaticon that they were in working order.

The skirling, floating dark clouded Vortex's vision, and Soundwave hadn't been able to explain it away by scan or test. It'd started small, just like the whispers over the empty gestaltlinks had blinked only the odd moment of disassociated memories into the helicopter's mind. The Constructicons had been more concerned with his continued complaints of thoughts that didn't belong to him than periodic dimming of his vision, but they hadn't found cause. The gestaltlinks were _dead_, the hardware around his spark chamber functional but the corresponding sparks extinguished. Their initial exams had turned up nothing but superficial blast damage, because Bruticus had been turned just enough to shield Vortex from the blast that'd killed the other Combaticons.

Lucky him.

Then there had been no more times for exams, no more Constructicons to give them, as Cybertron broke and burned and melted beneath the few refugees who'd struggled free of the dying planet. It'd been Soundwave who'd listened when Vortex mumbled complaints of corrupted memories and sight problems. And although Soundwave had barely enough repair experience to patch up the Decepticons who'd made it to the tiny moonbase, his diagnosis of the helicopter had been no different than the Constructicons': post-traumatic stress.

There hadn't been a treatment. They'd tried several different things, but all had been nothing but wishful thinking.

Now the shadows multiplied exponentially by every movement made around him, and Vortex could hardly remember where his memories ended, much less where they began. He knew that he'd forgotten so much, but not what he couldn't remember. Soundwave had been replaced by Hoist, but Vortex couldn't part the dense dull encroaching blackness to ask the Autobot medic for help. He didn't know for what, but the obvious thing the medic could do was check his vision. Sometimes he could see the little green mech. Most of the time he didn't. Most of the time, the last Combaticon sat in the isolation ward and watched the shadows multiply, and he couldn't see anyone for the dark.

The colors dulled first. No matter how he refreshed his input and rebooted visual systems, the colors lost vividness. Around the edges of his field of vision, even the stark words of his HUD paled to gray. It got harder to read them, because everything beyond them paled as well. It wasn't like a medbay was particularly colorful to begin with, but when the tangerine orange walls leeched to a pastel powder hue heading rapidly toward grey, well…it wasn't an improvement. He'd never been fond of the Autobots' idea of interior decoration, but he found himself staring hard, trying to pick out contrasts and different shades. He pored over the horrid tangerine color, analyzing what it looked like, what it reminded him of, what it evoked in him - because color was important when its absence loomed.

His vision had become a tightening funnel. Straight ahead, he could still see colors, although the highlights were muted. Metal didn't shine, and that was wrong. He _knew_ it was wrong, although shaking his head only made the whole room devolve into rings of black shadows and movement. The colors didn't run. They just dissolved away, eaten by grey, and his vision was fine. It was his perception of the data that had _changed_. The software had no errors, and the hardware worked perfectly. His mind was shutting down, refusing to see the proper color saturations. It was separating him from the outside world by reducing visual input to an incorrectly interpreted picture, and Vortex just dumbly watched black pixilation start at the corners. Layers and layers of shadows overlaid until they blotted everything out.

He remembered how the world should be, and it wasn't like that anymore.

He should have been frightened by that.

"Aren't you gonna **do** anything?" Blades asked him, and Vortex had seen him without seeing him at first. His inability to pay attention was handicapping him further. When he could see, he lost interest and didn't look.

Blades wouldn't let him look away. The shadows had deepened to the point that they swallowed the movement of things actually there to be seen, but not the unseen. The red-and-white Protectobot stood out against the shadows that weren't there because he wasn't there, either. The Combaticon was strangely okay with that, but then again, he was used to Starscream, too. It'd taken him a long time sitting here on the repair berth to remember why it wasn't normal to see dead mechs.

The facts free-floating through his head were hard to connect, and it took so much effort to keep a thought more than a fleeting instant. Blades had to repeat himself a few times before the Combaticon managed to catch all his words, and the Decepticon just stared blankly when he did. Do…something? What? Could something be done? The little medic that he sometimes saw fussing around him did things, didn't he? And before him, Soundwave had tried…things. As had the Constructicons. Vortex knew that, although he couldn't recall what exactly had been tried.

He just remembered that they hadn't worked. They hadn't worked, just like hooking up a dying spark to his own hadn't stopped - hadn't saved -

There was someone he couldn't remember, and Vortex's numbed spark lurched in his chest. His memories scattered glass through his head, the brief image of a flickering spark behind a broken windshield, and he had _tried._ He had tried something, and it hadn't worked.

But he couldn't…he couldn't remember what it'd been.

His Autobot counterpart made a frustrated noise and gestured at the other berths in the room. "You're gonna just sit there and, what, go into statis? You're gonna **let** this happen to you?"

The Combaticon swung his head around slowly, fumbling the motor relays with uncooperative mental fingers. The physical difficulty was new. He didn't feel much in general, but grasping after his own bodily functions brought back memories of when Shockwave had prepared his spark for extraction. He'd spent a joor strapped to a table, side-by-side with the others, chest plates forced open, and he'd been confused. They'd been aware of their sentence, but not what would actually happen once they were dragged from their prison cells. Shockwave hadn't deigned to explain the procedure, so all the helicopter had known was the odd sensation of being one step removed from his own body. It was only when Brawl's shriek cut off mid-extraction and Vortex had seen the spark casing that he'd understood what was going on.

There were bodies on the berths, here, although there were no straps. Maybe he should have felt alarmed by the similarities, but he couldn't even recall the original emotions anymore. Fear and anticipation had melted away, as lost to the dark as color.

The feeling of waiting remained the same. He didn't know for what, he didn't know why, but he knew he was waiting.

The 'bot who eventually came through the door at the end of the door was green, not purple. At some point, he must have figured out that Vortex's processor cycles weren't synchronizing with his spark pulse anymore. He faded around the edges, ringed with shadowy movements and bleaching of color when he checked on the other bodies in the room, but he kept his movements steady and very, very slow. Vortex still couldn't hear whatever he tried to say, the white noise and chipmunk chatter drowning in the dim haze creeping over him. He tended to forget that he'd been trying to listen, too, only to realize long afterward that the words had stopped.

So long as the Autobot stayed visible, however, Vortex's head turned to follow him. The dot of clarity in the middle of his vision narrowed, diameter shrinking, and soon he wouldn't be able to tell green from purple. It would all be grey. The colors would disappear.

It was important to keep the colors. The Combaticon floundered when trying to think _why_, but the highlights were already gone. Soon the shadows would take over, and there wouldn't even be grey. It would be black and white. And then? Just black. That would be…bad, right?

"You have to do something," the flicker of brilliant, pure red at the corner of his vision demanded, and he couldn't ignore it. Blades was so bright against the darkness. "You **have** to!"

Hissing silence answered that demand. If the Combaticon had been able to think of a reply, he'd lost any motivation to say it aloud. Instead, Vortex simply sat watched the Autobot medic. He saw the mech without really comprehending his presence. He only wanted to keep the green centered in his narrowing tunnel vision. That was the only goal he could stay focus on.

"If you won't do something, **I** will," declared near his helm, loud enough that audios would have burst.

It shook Vortex in a way real noise couldn't anymore. The shadows shook slightly, and his mind rattled against the inside of his head.

He lost sight of the green. That washed tepid dismay through him briefly.

There was a pressure on his arm. There had been pressure for quite a while, now, but only now did Vortex finally react to it. He turned his head to look at where he thought the pressure was coming from. He wasn't sure, but he guessed. The movement felt jerky, the helicopter fighting to hold onto bodily commands. Connecting physical sensation to a specific location seemed very finicky. He didn't know why he bothered. The searing white-and-red colors beside him kept goading him onward, perhaps.

Red-and-white, but weird. Blades kept blinking on and off. He was blurry, like looking through flames, or like Vortex was seeing the Autobot's colors through the haze that coated everything. Under the shadows, he could almost see another color. Grey, yes, but - ? Green. There were hands insistently pulling at his arm, but he wasn't sure who they belonged to.

It took him yet more time to orient the hole in the shadows. His visor worked fine, but he was searching for a pinprick of green in a grey world. Green, not purple. That seemed…important, once upon a memory. Because the form under the red-and-white burn was pallid green, but the actions could have been done by someone purple. The hands of the medic were Blades' colors, doing Shockwave's actions. Vortex watched, confused and struggling to think why.

The body on the berth beside him had an open chest. This was more than memory, and it should have been horrible. He remembered that. He remembered the way their chest plates had been peeled back, efficient but terrible because such things were not done, and he hadn't understood. He didn't understand now. The shadows blurred the medic, black rings of motion, but Blades stood out so clearly. Blades' hands pulled at him, but they weren't the Autobot helicopter's hands. Were they? Vortex didn't know.

He followed the pressure on his arm, the pinprick of living green and the flaming brilliance of the dead, because it wasn't purple. He was moving, and he didn't know why. Vague unease stirred, far under the thick shell covering his spark.

"Stand up! Frag you to the Pit, stand up!"

The world had become grey sullenly edged with black, the shadows kept breeding and eating him alive, but he stumbled to his feet because he could still feel them. The haze roiled as motion piled up, a thousand images in through optical sensors that couldn't communicate with a mind to register them. He was blind and isolated, falling into statis while standing, and Blades _shrieked_ at him.

"No! **No!** I don't give a flying wingnut if you go under, but not now, not when - !"

Not when what?

The shadows bloomed, blotting everything out, but the pressure on his arm kept pulling. The green medic's hand with the dead mech's urgency, and only when Blades shouted did Vortex figure out what he was trying to do.

"Protectobots: Form Defensor!"

The colors were gone, what little Vortex could see had _changed_, but it was still too late. He saw the open chest and the spark chamber, with its pristine gestaltlink hardware, and he _understood_.

Blades, like Shockwave before him, ignored his screaming.

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